DIVEssays in collection argue that Latin American legal institutions were both mechanisms of social control and unique arenas for ordinary people to contest government policies and resist exploitation./div

Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History centers on people from different parts of the world who came together to form societies by chance and by design in the years after 1492. This text encourages detailed exploration of the cultural development of colonial Latin America through a wide variety of documents and visual materials, most of which have been translated and presented originally for this collection.

A second edition of this book is now available. The Human Tradition in Colonial Latin America is an anthology of life stories of largely ordinary individuals struggling to forge a life during the unstable colonial period in Latin America. These mini-biographies show the tensions that emerged when the political, social, religious, and economic ideals of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial regimes and the Roman Catholic Church conflicted with the realities of daily life in the Americas. The essays examine subthemes of gender roles; race and ethnicity; conflicts over religious orthodoxy; and crime, violence, and rebellion, while illustrating the overall theme of social order and disorder in a colonial setting. Professor Andrien has carefully selected pieces to comprise a volume that is well balanced in terms of geography, gender, and ethnicity. Written by established scholars, the essays are designed to be readable and interesting to students. Ideal for courses on Colonial Latin American history and the Latin American history survey, The Human Tradition in Colonial Latin America will interest as well as inform students. Contributions by: Rolena Adorno, Kenneth J. Andrien, Peter Blanchard, Christiana Borchart de Moreno, Noble David Cook, Lyman L. Johnson, Grant D. Jones, Mary Karasch, Alida C. Metcalf, Kenneth Mills, Muriel S. Nazzari, Ana Maria Presta, Susan E. Ramirez, Matthew Restall, Ward Stavig, Camilla Townsend, Ann Twinam, and Nancy E. van Deusen."

This book provides a general history of Latin America in the period between the European conquest and the gaining of independence by the Spanish American countries and Brazil (approximately 1492-1825). It is both an introduction for the student at the college level and a provisionally updated synthesis of the quickly changing field for the more experienced reader. The authors' aim is not only to treat colonial Brazil and colonial Spanish America in a single volume, something rarely done, but also to view early Latin America as one unit with a centre and peripheries, all parts of which were characterized by variants of the same kinds of change, regardless of national and imperial borders. The authors integrate both the older and the newer historical literature, seeing legal, institutional, and political phenomena within a social, economic, and cultural context. They incorporate insights from other disciplines and newer techniques of historical research, but eschew jargon or technical concepts. The approach of the book, with its emphasis on broad social and economic trends across large areas and long time periods, does much to throw light on Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well.

For twenty-five years, Kendall Brown studied Potosí, Spanish America's greatest silver producer and perhaps the world's most famous mining district. He read about the flood of silver that flowed from its Cerro Rico and learned of the toil of its miners. Potosí symbolized fabulous wealth and unbelievable suffering. New World bullion stimulated the formation of the first world economy but at the same time it had profound consequences for labor, as mine operators and refiners resorted to extreme forms of coercion to secure workers. In many cases the environment also suffered devastating harm. All of this occurred in the name of wealth for individual entrepreneurs, companies, and the ruling states. Yet the question remains of how much economic development mining managed to produce in Latin America and what were its social and ecological consequences. Brown's focus on the legendary mines at Potosí and comparison of its operations to those of other mines in Latin America is a well-written and accessible study that is the first to span the colonial era to the present.

In colonial Latin America, social identity did not correlate neatly with fixed categories of race and ethnicity. As Imperial Subjects demonstrates, from the early years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, understandings of race and ethnicity were fluid. In this collection, historians offer nuanced interpretations of identity as they investigate how Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multi-ethnic progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and as imperial subjects. The contributors’ explorations of the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the identities historical actors presented span the entire colonial period and beyond: from early contact to the legacy of colonial identities in the new republics of the nineteenth century. The volume includes essays on the major colonial centers of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, as well as the Caribbean basin and the imperial borderlands. Whether analyzing cases in which the Inquisition found that the individuals before it were “legally” Indians and thus exempt from prosecution, or considering late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century petitions for declarations of whiteness that entitled the mixed-race recipients to the legal and social benefits enjoyed by whites, the book’s contributors approach the question of identity by examining interactions between imperial subjects and colonial institutions. Colonial mandates, rulings, and legislation worked in conjunction with the exercise and negotiation of power between individual officials and an array of social actors engaged in countless brief interactions. Identities emerged out of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group association and externalized social norms and categories. Contributors. Karen D. Caplan, R. Douglas Cope, Mariana L. R. Dantas, María Elena Díaz, Andrew B. Fisher, Jane Mangan, Jeremy Ravi Mumford, Matthew D. O’Hara, Cynthia Radding, Sergio Serulnikov, Irene Silverblatt, David Tavárez, Ann Twinam

In [this book, the author] presents Latin American history from the "bottom up" with emphasis on indigenous peoples, African slaves, and mixed-race workers and peasants. According to [the author], colonialism was a process of accommodation and conflict between numerous ethnic groups and the European settlers who took control of the land and the people. The cultural diversity and racial mixture unique to the colonial experience find ample expression in ... many historical documents that depict the contributions of ordinary people. -Back cover.